SYSTEMS SAVVY: THEORY, MEASUREMENT, and IMPACT

Presentation at the 2014 Academy of Management Meetings. Systems savvy is the ability to grasp possible functions of technology tools and organizational processes and how these might be meshed to best effect. This is the academic work underlying the book, The Plugged-In Manager.

Strong similarity for how you might be treated by the Philadelphia Police if you went out an robbed a liquor store tonight. My question is this, how much of a difference does it make to have your hands up or not? The original public pictures actually showed arms like this…. My claim is that the designers may not have had, or at least been able to act on, high levels of system savvy. There seemed to be a technocentric approach to the process in stead of a sociotechnical one. Most of the organizational and human changes have come far later, but not on the public table during the initial implementation. I look forward to all the decision making documents being made public so we can do an actual assessment.

When we do address organizational and technological, we have less to say about how the intertwining happens.

Leonardi, P. M. 2012. Materiality, Sociomateriality, and Socio-Technical Systems: What Do These Terms Mean? How are They Related? Do We Need Them?, Materiality and organizing: Social interaction in a technological world: 25-48: Oxford University Press.

We believe that a field appropriate, validated tool will help us in studying the dynamics of acquiring system savvy and the dynamics of the intertwining process.

Here is the version in the paper showing possible antecedents and how systems savvy can moderate the possible technical and organizational options.

I’ll save the details for the discussion, but we followed the techniques from Sternberg et al. & Weekley et al. to create and scale six situational judgment tasks and their responses. The prompt question is something that they couldn’t have learning in a book.

More details.

We identified and interviewed over 13 people who had been identified as systems savvy by their peers. Many of these stories appear in Griffith, T.L. (2011). The Plugged-In Manager: Get in Tune With Your People, Technology, and Organization to Thrive. Jossey-Bass.

We used the techniques from Sternberg et al. & Weekley et al. to create scenario responses and then worked with two focus groups to refine those responses and create a new scenario.

The next step was to create a scoring key using samples of 39 peer-identified systems savvy respondents and 182 novices.

During the initial scenario collection we were expecting the interviewees to discuss sociotechnical answers – combinations of organization and technology. While they generally did this – they also would talk about letting events emerge. This brought us to Judge et al.

Average Ranking of Systems Savvy sample versus Novice Sample. Note that the systems savvy sample has a preference for the Technology-Organization-Emergent response, and a disinclination to the unilateral responses using just technology or just and organizational outcome. The Novices are much less differentiated.

We started out with six scenarios. One was unable to differentiate between novices and systems savvy – so validated set includes only five scenarios.

The important story about the SJT scales is that it helps us differentiate savvy people from novices. Slide shows that the SJT scale alone accurately classifies 89.6% of the respondents, while random assignment would differentiate only 50%.

Slide shows that the SJT scale alone accurately classifies 89.6% of the respondents, while random assignment would differentiate only 50%. Slide shows that the likert scaled measure correctly classifies novices, and that the SJT scale does not improve the differentiation of novices, but doubles the accuracy of classification of savvy individuals.

Thomas and Bostrom (2010), for example, provide a new lens for exogenous elements that may trigger improvements in how tools are used by teams. The value of organizational memory is limited by how well the organization’s members know how to store and access memories, and/or how well that knowledge is placed (for example, in organizational routines or hardware architectures) for more tacit use.

Transcript of "SYSTEMS SAVVY: THEORY, MEASUREMENT, and IMPACT"

2.
#AOM2014_1836
Systems savvy is the ability to grasp
possible functions/affordances of
technology tools and organizational
processes and how these might be
meshed to best effect.
Technology & Organizational Dimensions,
with a touch of Emergence

4.
#AOM2014_1836
“[a]lthough most studies up to this
point have sufficed to simply show
that social and the material are
thoroughly intertwined, scholars
are just beginning to consider how
such intertwinement occurs”
(Leonardi, 2012, p. 35).

5.
#AOM2014_1836
We provide a model of systems
savvy and a field validated
measurement tool
(Situational Judgment Task)